The Orphan Choir

by Hannah, Sophie

  ‘Work,’ I say flatly. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Like what?’ Stuart looks puzzled.

  ‘So just work, then?’ I have to check. I wouldn’t want to be unfair to him.

  ‘Yes. Work. If I’m lucky, I’ll finish in time to get a reasonably early night.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ I say innocently. ‘You need your sleep.’ Stuart is the sort of person who would never lay a trap, which is why he has fallen so readily into mine. Pitiful.

  He has completely forgotten his promise to have a word with Mr Fahrenheit – this afternoon, as soon as we get back from Saviour, having taken care not to wake him too early.

  3

  Noise Diary – Monday 1 October, 11.10 a.m.

  Last night there was more noise disturbance from Mr Clay, for the first time ever on a Sunday night. At about 11 p.m., just as I was on the point of falling asleep, loud pop music started playing in his basement. Despite it being two floors away from my bedroom, I could hear it clearly – and by clearly I mean the bass-line of each song pounded through the party wall and travelled up to my room. I could hear all the lyrics, and I could hear the distinct voices of Mr Clay and his friends singing (or rather screaming) along at the top of their lungs. He played this pop music from exactly 11 p.m. until exactly midnight, when he switched it off – literally, at midnight on the dot.

  This has never happened before – not only the playing of music on a Sunday night, but also the disturbance lasting precisely an hour. Mr Clay’s loud pop singalong parties are always long and drawn out; they typically last for several hours. I simply don’t believe that on this occasion he wanted to play music only for an hour. This was a malicious, planned noise attack. Its sole aim was to upset and intimidate me. In the past when I’ve been round to Mr Clay’s house to complain about noise, he has stressed (in his defence) that he only ever does this on Fridays and Saturdays: the nights when it’s acceptable to use sleep deprivation to drive your neighbours insane, according to his bizarre moral code. I therefore take his decision to play loud music on a Sunday night as his way of saying, ‘You didn’t appreciate how considerate I was before and you wouldn’t let me have my fun, so let’s see how you like this. From now on I’m going to stop you from sleeping whenever I feel like it, Sunday through Thursday, every night if I want to.’

  I didn’t go round to complain. Partly because my husband was against it – he thinks that, having reported the matter to the council, we must now leave it in their hands and do nothing but log all disturbances as instructed – and partly because I didn’t want to give Mr Clay the satisfaction of seeing how much he’d riled me. Actually, I was more than riled; I was (and am) in a pretty bad way – the technical term would probably be ‘a severely distressed state’. Does the council have any protocol for dealing with that? On previous occasions I’ve been very annoyed by the inconvenience, but now that Mr Clay has escalated to personal nastiness and targeted attacks, and especially given his use of boys’ voices singing choral music as a weapon, I would describe myself more as distraught than angry. At about quarter past eleven last night, while Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’ was booming through the wall, I was violently sick.

  It wasn’t food poisoning, as my husband suggested, and I am not coming down with anything. I can’t prove it, but I know that what made me ill was the horrifying (and I don’t use this word lightly) sensation of having my home invaded, yet again, by a man who seeks deliberately to harm me. I no longer feel safe here in my house. He can torment me with his noise whenever he wants, and there’s nothing I can do to stop him. I can’t believe this is allowed to happen. If a burglar broke in and I called the police, they would remove him from my home immediately. Why isn’t there a law that allows people to banish, instantly, noise that has intruded and threatened someone in their own home? A home is meant to be a refuge from the world, a safe haven. Mine at the moment feels like the opposite – so much so that the only way I can survive this ordeal, psychologically, is by latching on to the idea of buying a second property, somewhere far away from Justin Clay, to escape to at weekends. I would be tempted to escape during the week as well if it weren’t for the need to stay here near my son’s school so that I can go to his choral services three times a week.

  After the music stopped at midnight, I tried to get back to sleep. I failed. At 1 a.m., very quiet choral music started playing: a boys’ choir singing the hymn ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’. The second verse was sung by a soloist who sounded uncannily similar to my son (and no, all choirboys do not sound the same). At one in the morning, exhausted and distressed, I’m sure I would have been paranoid enough to think, ‘That’s Joseph,’ and be convinced that Mr Clay was using my own son’s voice to torture me. The only reason I didn’t think this is that I know Saviour College choir hasn’t made any recordings since Joseph joined the school.

  I did wonder for a chilling moment if Mr Clay had somehow illicitly made a recording of my son singing. Thankfully, I was able to reassure myself on this front: whenever Joseph has sung with the choir and it’s been possible to get anywhere near him, I’ve been there. And Mr Clay hasn’t. So it’s impossible that it was Joseph’s voice coming through my bedroom wall at 1 a.m. The similarity must have been a coincidence.

  The hymn, like the choral music of the night before, was coming from Mr Clay’s bedroom. It was loud enough to make it through the wall, though if I’d been asleep, it wouldn’t have woken me. Stuart, my husband, struggled to hear it when I woke him and asked him to listen. So … while I might not classify this as a noise disturbance under normal circumstances, it is certainly a crucial component of Mr Clay’s campaign of persecution.

  After playing the hymn once, Mr Clay then didn’t play any more music. I am able to attest to this because I was awake crying for the rest of the night. And today I’ve had to phone in sick because I’m in no fit state to go to work, thanks to my arsehole of a neighbour. I can hardly think a coherent sentence let alone speak one out loud, and I look awful. I have puffy swellings and two semicircular scabbed-over red ridges underneath my eyes. I wouldn’t want to inflict the sight of myself on other human beings. How often is this going to happen? One day off is one thing, but I can’t make a habit of it.

  Can the council PLEASE do something, quickly, before this man destroys my career, health and sanity? Or before I murder him?

  Noise Diary – Monday 1 October, 5.18 p.m.

  This is going to be a rather unconventional noise diary entry, but I feel I need to include it for the sake of full disclosure. There would be no point in my withholding it, in any case, because Mr Clay will be sure to mention it, assuming I go through with my plan and don’t chicken out. Since I was off work today and had time on my hands, I decided to do something useful, after first crashing out for three hours and catching up on sleep. I went into town and headed for Fopp on Sidney Street. In case you don’t know it, Fopp is a music and DVD shop that has a split personality. It’s a weird mixture of HMV-style commercial and weird beat-generation dive-cum-boutique.

  On one wall there’s a neat display of the top twenty chart CDs, but by the counter there are piles of books about Kafka, Hunter S. Thompson, William Burroughs, Frida Kahlo. The staff always seem to have fashionably edgy hairstyles, unconventional clothes, earrings that look like rings designed for fingers except inserted into an ear lobe to create a bordered hole.

  It was only because of the confused identity of the shop and its alternative-looking employees that I thought to ask the question I asked; if I’d been in HMV, I’d have managed on my own and done my best, but the baggy-eyed, indoor-hatted young man behind the counter looked as if he might be able to give me expert advice and so I thought, ‘Why not?’ I told him about Mr Clay. Well, I didn’t mention him by name, but I said that I had a noisy neighbour who seemed intent on sabotaging my sleep every night, and that I wanted to arm myself with a means of getting my own back. I asked him which CD he would least like to be woken by at 6 a.m. Mr Clay is not an early riser.
I’ve seen him open his bedroom curtains at ten-thirty, eleven, eleven-thirty. Certainly I’ve never seen him up and about earlier than ten. And once when he was telling me about a holiday he’d booked, in the days before relations were as strained as they are now, he said there was no way he was getting up before nine to catch any flight. Cruel and unusual punishment, he called it.

  The man behind the counter at Fopp grinned and said, ‘I’ve been asked that before. I always recommend the same CD: Prophecy. Capleton.’ I didn’t know which of those was the band and which the album title. ‘I can recommend a specific track too,’ he said. ‘ “Leave Babylon”. Best song on the album. Either that or “Wings of the Morning”, but “Leave Babylon”’s less conventionally tuneful – it’s kind of got a dissonant sort of tune, you know? Really jarring – perfect for disturbing a neighbour. Like, the melody’s there underneath, but there’s, like, this kind of anti-melody overlaid on top? And they strain against each other, in a totally brilliant way? Masterpiece, it is.’

  I told him my neighbour didn’t deserve to have any contact with a masterpiece and asked if there wasn’t an equally jarring and dissonant song he could think of that had no musical redeeming features whatsoever. He laughed. ‘No, this is the right song, trust me. It’s angry – you want angry, to show him you’re not taking any more of his shit.’ He started to sing at that point, in a put-on Jamaican accent, about equal rights, justice and revolution – an extract from ‘Leave Babylon’, I assumed.

  It sounded impressively fierce, the way he sang it. ‘All right, I’ll take it,’ I said. He seemed pleased and said he’d go and find it for me. Then he frowned and said, ‘Oh, one thing I should say. Capleton, the singer, songwriter, whatever – he’s, well, he’s got some dodgy views. He’s seriously homophobic. I mean, I listen to him all the time – I personally don’t think you can boycott works of art because their creators are dicks, but … it wouldn’t be fair not to tell you, in case you disagree.’

  I thought about it and decided it would actually be perfect if the artist had abhorrent views. Mr Clay and I are at war, I explained. Why would I want to wake him with something inoffensive when instead I can blast the angry words of a horrible homophobe through his bedroom wall? I want to send as much negative energy his way as I possibly can. The shop assistant laughed and said, ‘Fair enough.’

  I left Fopp feeling happier and more powerful. I could and would do to Mr Clay exactly what he’d been doing to me. What was to stop me? Obvious answer: Stuart, if he was at home, but he often wasn’t. He often has to get up at four or five a.m. to fly somewhere – those were the mornings I would choose to execute judgement and justice according to the words of the song, I decided. In fact, I knew Stuart would be leaving home before six tomorrow morning, which was why I was keen to go to Fopp today.

  As I walked home, I became obsessed by one question: why hadn’t Mr Clay anticipated that I would have this idea? Did he think I was too middle class and civilised to stoop to his level and give as good as I got? Or did he not care if I fought back, because he knew what his next retaliatory move would be and knew it would totally wipe me out? Then I thought: what could his next move possibly be that would be worse than what he’s doing already but not land him in serious trouble with the police? And if he did do something truly terrible, he would have no way of knowing that it wouldn’t push me over the edge into doing something equally appalling in retaliation.

  By the time I arrived home, I’d decided that I would take my chances. Just one song to make my point – ‘Leave Babylon’, only a few minutes long – and then I’d turn off the music and let him go back to sleep.

  I haven’t changed my mind. After what he’s put me through two nights running, I’m sure even the council wouldn’t begrudge me my three-minute protest. I am looking forward to it. Of course, I hope it goes without saying that if by any chance tonight is a different story and Mr Clay allows me to sleep uninterrupted, I will cancel my planned Capleton offensive.

  Noise Diary – Tuesday 2 October, 3.04 a.m.

  I know what he does. With the choral music, through the bedroom wall. I’ve worked it out. He must start by turning the volume up to the maximum setting, to create a high enough level of auditory shock to wake me from a deep sleep. Then, after maybe only a few seconds of loud, he turns it right down. By the time I realise I’m awake and that I can hear choirboys’ voices, the music is playing at an acceptable volume that would be incapable of waking anybody – that even I have to sit quietly in order to hear. I woke Stuart when I first heard it, half an hour ago, and I don’t think he could hear it at all this time. I say ‘I don’t think’ because he refused to answer when I asked him. He snapped at me that he had to be up in about three hours and could I please let him sleep? Then he rolled over and was snoring again within seconds.

  I know what Justin Clay wants me to think: why did I wake up? It’s not loud. Could I be imagining this barely audible music? Tonight there wasn’t even a prelude of obnoxious pop or country-lite. He is trying to drive me mad, I think, in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense. He wants me to doubt the evidence of my ears and wonder whether it’s possible that he would wait silently until 2.30 in the morning and then play a strange, atonal version of the Magnificat at an inoffensive volume. Except it was offensive at first – it must have been. I woke in shock, my heart pounding. I was dragged from my dream by what felt like a sudden explosion of young boys’ voices. The only thing I can’t work out is how he manages to time it so perfectly. How does he know exactly how long the loud part has to last to wake me up? He’s bound to miscalculate one day; I’ll find myself fully awake before he’s turned it down and I’ll know for sure. Maybe I’ll set up some kind of recording device – I assume the council has some of these that they loan out to the victims of noisy neighbours, in order to acquire the proof they might later need in court?

  And the rich he has sent empty away. ‘Has’, in this version of the Mag. Not ‘hath’. Did Mr Clay do any work at all yesterday, or did he devote his Monday to building his library of choral CDs to torture me with? It took me no more than an hour to walk to Fopp, buy the Capleton CD and walk home. After that, I got on with other things and even succeeded in forgetting about my war with my neighbour for a while (mainly because I was busy missing my son, but still). Now I feel stupid and naive. So I’ve bought one CD – so what? If I want to defeat the noise plague next door, I must be as single-minded as Justin Clay. Instead of making do with only one CD and congratulating myself on how reasonable I am because I’m only going to blast him with one song, I must set aside time to build up a library of music with which to bombard his early mornings over a period of weeks, maybe even months.

  Well, there’s no point in my going back to sleep now if I’ve got to be up at quarter to six, preparing to give Clay his alarm call. Also, the swollen patches under my eyes have split again and are simultaneously stinging and throbbing. I am in too much pain to sleep. All this crying I’m doing lately means I’m having to rub my eyes a lot, though I’m trying to avoid doing so. I hope that when you read this, council, you will take urgent action (as I’ve been pleading with you to do all along). It’s not only my sleep and my eyes that this bastard is wrecking. At this rate my marriage won’t be far behind. At the moment, I couldn’t possibly hate my husband more, on account of his lack of support. I doubt I’ll see things differently in the morning, since I will be as tired then as I am now. And, actually, it’s already the morning.

  Noise Diary – Tuesday 2 October, 12.10 p.m.

  Hello, Noise Diary! Sorry – I sound like a teenager. My excuse is that I am feeling triumphant. While I don’t want to tempt fate by saying anything as blatant as ‘My plan worked,’ or ‘That went better than I could have hoped,’ I must admit that my feelings at the moment are along those lines. At exactly six o’clock this morning, I pressed the ‘play’ button on my old ghetto blaster, having first positioned it right next to my bedroom wall, which was as close as I could get it to Ju
stin Clay’s sleeping head. Capleton’s ‘Leave Babylon’ started to blast out (the Fopp guy was right, its melody is subtly hidden beneath a surface of cacophonous aural assault). While it played, I danced around the room, jumping up and down as heavily as I could, hoping that the pounding bass effect would be accompanied by shaking floorboards on Mr Clay’s side of the party wall.

  I succeeded in waking him up. When the song finished, I switched off the ghetto blaster, stopped leaping around and waited in silence. Three seconds later I heard him shout, ‘All right, for fuck’s sake. Point made and taken.’

  I really don’t want to get my hopes up (too late – they’re up, and there’s nothing I can do about it), and I’ve replayed his words over and over again in my mind, hunting for other possible interpretations, but I’ve found none. What he said and the way he said it sounded to me like someone unambiguously conceding defeat.

  Can it really be as easy as that?

  4

  Pat Jervis isn’t listening to me. Not looking and not listening. Instead, she’s standing in front of the window, pressing the tip of her index finger against the pane.

  It can’t be a coincidence. Either it’s a nervous tic or she has an obsession, perhaps even a fetish. Glassophilia – does such a thing exist? Last time she was here, she did exactly the same thing with the lounge mirror and the glass in one of the picture frames in the kitchen. If it were a fetish, surely she’d stroke it rather than prod it with her fingertip.

  ‘Pat? Did you hear what I just said?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Still, she doesn’t take her finger off the window.

  ‘I hate myself for being so naive. I feel like tearing up my stupid noise diary –’

  ‘Don’t do that.’